Why Gasification?

One of the most compelling challenges of the 21st Century is finding a way to meet national and global energy needs while minimizing the impact on the environment. Gasification can help meet those challenges.

Gasification is a time-tested, reliable, and flexible technology that converts carbonaceous materials, biomass, municipal waste, scrap tires and plastics into a clean high energy gas.

The PowerHearth produces a clean, particulate-free gas that can be used to fuel industrial boilers or to power internal combustion or turbine engines with generators to produce megawatts of electricity.

Gasification does not involve combustion, (or burning), but instead is a thermal chemical process that uses high temperature in a controlled environment, with limited oxygen, to convert carbon-based materials directly into a high energy ‘producer gas’. The gasification process breaks these materials down to the molecular level, so impurities can be easily and inexpensively removed.

Gasification plants bring good jobs to a community – construction jobs needed to build a plant, and well-paying permanent jobs needed to run the plant.

Compared to the old coal-burning plants, gasification can capture carbon dioxide much more efficiently and at a lower cost. This capture technology is being successfully used at gasification plants in the U.S. and worldwide.

Gasification is an investment in our energy future.

Gasification is not incineration

Gasification is not incineration. Incineration is the burning of fuels in an oxygen-rich environment, where the waste material combusts and produces heat and carbon dioxide, along with a variety of other pollutants. Gasification is the conversion of feedstocks into their simplest molecules - carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane forming a syngas or producer gas that can be used for generating electricity or producing thermal heat.